Carroll recognized the voice. He stepped out of the shadows and strode across the open space. At the corner of the house he met the muzzle of a revolver pointing straight at the pit of his stomach. Back of it were the steady and now goggleless eyes of Luther Pruyn. “I am unarmed,” said Carroll. “Ah, it’s you!” said the other. He lowered his weapon, carefully whirled the cylinder to bring the hammer opposite an empty chamber, and dropped it in his pocket. “What do you want?” “An explanation.” “Quite so,” said the other coolly. “I’d forgotten that I invited you here. How long had you been watching me?” “I saw you only when you came out from behind the house.” “And you wish to know about—about my companion in this place?” continued the other in an odd tone. “Yes.” “Understand that I don’t admit that you have the smallest right. But to clear up a situation which no longer exists, I’m ready to satisfy you. Come in.” He held open the door of the room where the lone light was burning. In the middle of the floor was spread a sheet, beneath which a form was outlined in grisly significance. Carroll’s host lifted the cover. The woman was white-haired, frail, and wrinkled. One side of her face shone in the lamplight with a strange hue, like tarnished silver. In her throat was a small bluish wound; opposite it a gaping hole. “Shot!” exclaimed Carroll. “Who did it?” “Some high-minded Caracuñan patriot, I suppose.” “Why?” “Well, I suspect that it was a mistake. From a distance and inside a window, she might easily have been taken for some one else.” Carroll’s mind reverted to his companion’s ready revolver. “Yourself, for instance?” he suggested. “Why, yes.” “Who was she?” There was left in the Southerner’s manner no trace of the cross-examiner. Suspicion had departed from him at the first sight of that old and still face, leaving only sympathy and pity. “My patient.” “Have you been running a private hospital up here?” “Oh, no. I took her because there was no other place fit for her to go to. And I had to keep her presence secret, because there’s a law against harboring lepers here. A pretty cruel brute of a law it is, too.” “Leprosy!” exclaimed Carroll, looking at that strange silvery face with a shudder. “Isn’t it fearfully contagious?” “Not in any ordinary sense. I was trying a new serum on her, and had planned to smuggle her across to Curaçao, when this ended it.” “Curaçao? Then that pass for yourself and wife—By the way, that and your coat are over in the thicket, where I dropped them.” “Thank you. But it doesn’t say ‘wife.’ It says simply ‘a woman.’” “And you were encumbering yourself with an unknown leper, at a time like this, just as an act of human kindness?” There was something almost reverential in Carroll’s voice. “Scientific interest, in part. Besides, she wasn’t wholly unknown. She’s a sort of cousin of Raimonda’s.” Carroll’s mind flew back to his fatally misinterpreted conversation with the young Caracuñan.